World Maker Faire: The New Ultimaker

Just as the the gates opened at the World Maker Faire in New York City the skies opened, sending everyone underneath the tents and pavilians on the faire grounds. Luckily, I was able to check out the new Ultimaker before that happened, and only a day after it was officially announced.

Compared to the older laser-cut Ultimaker, the Ultimaker 2 is much, much cleaner that’s made more for designers and architects instead of students, hackerspaces and tinkerers. There are a few new additions to the Ultimaker 2 – OLED display, heated bed, and a larger build volume. Basically, if you want Ultimaker quality without a lot of futzing around, go with the Ultimaker 2.

Ultimaker will be shipping a pre-assembled version for €1.895,00, with a kit version to follow shortly. As always, the Ultimaker 2 is open source, and no, this doesn’t mean an end to the classic Ultimaker.

The ultimaker software cura is actually pretty good at overhangs and adding cutaway support. it even takes into account of the time it takes for the previous layer to cool before placing another on top. download it and drop an STL file in there, play with the views and you’ll see what i mean.

Small correction, there are no plans for a kit version of the UM2. The UM-Original will still be sold as kit, as the wood lasercut is much better for tinkerers that want to modify the printer. And price wise the kit is better.
(There are plans to upgrade the kit with the improvements of the UM2 and first of those will be the much requested heated-bed kit)

There is a dual-head addon for het UM-Original. For the UM2 it will be released later, when we are more confident about the whole operation of dual-extrusion. We are having some issues with PVA and oozing. And want to fix that first before we put it in our “pro looking” machine.

Ah, i wonder if it will be just as “open source” as the original ultimaker, where you can only find the lasercutting plans, but not the specifications of any rods, z-axis, hot end, special manufactured parts, bushings, etc. They just like to sound “open”, but they’re not, sadly.

I agree with you here, this has been wrong for a long time. But it will be fixed soon. Initially it was an issue with not even having the specs. Did you know that when I started at Ultimaker 1.5 year ago, they did not even have a proper BOM for the Ultimaker?
The reason why nothing else was posted was not because they did not want too, but because they did not have the info and did not have the time to make it.
We now have all the files and will start putting them online shortly.

Also, we do do OpenSource software development. I already put the firmware sources for the UM2 online. For example, and all Cura development is happening fully open.

(The bushings are not specially made, but they are a bit difficult to source)